WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Monday it had approved a vaccine against Japanese encephalitis made by Austria-based Intercell AG (ICEL.VI).

The vaccine, called Ixiaro, would be the only vaccine for the mosquito-transmitted disease available in the United States. (Reporting by Maggie Fox) *(Maggie.Fox@Reuters.com; 1 202 898 8492)

INSTITUTE, W.Va. — Last August, an explosion tore through the Bayer CropScience chemical plant here, killing two employees and raising the fears of residents in what has long been known as Chemical Valley.

Now, a federal agency wants to hold a public hearing to lay out its preliminary findings about what caused the accident. But Bayer, citing a terrorism-related federal law, is trying to limit what the agency can disclose.

Bayer contends that because it has a dock for barge shipments on the adjacent Kanawha River, its entire 400-acre site qualifies under the 2002 federal Maritime Transportation Security Act. It has asked the Coast Guard, which has jurisdiction under the act, to review the public release of “sensitive security information.”

The agency that wants to hold the hearing, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, says it is the first time in its 11 years of operation that a company has tried to limit what could be discussed publicly, and the first time the maritime act has been invoked this way.

“I don’t like the idea that if we went to a meeting in West Virginia and someone asked a question, we’d have to say, ‘Sorry, we can’t talk about it,’ ” said John S. Bresland, the board chairman. “We don’t think any other agency should have the right to tell us what we can put in our reports.”

In particular, Bayer appears to want to limit discussion about the potential hazards posed by a chemical produced and used by the plant — methyl isocyanate, the same chemical responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Bhopal, India, after a Union Carbide plant leaked there in 1984. Until 1986, Union Carbide owned the plant here, which was considered the sister plant.

The chemical safety board believes that if Bayer is successful, it will set a precedent for other companies to limit the release of information.

The board was modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board. And like the transportation board, it has no regulatory power, so it cannot fine a company or order changes in operations. Its power comes from revealing its findings and making recommendations.

“We have a bully pulpit,” Mr. Bresland said, “and we use it by going out in public and talking about what we’ve found.”

After Bayer invoked the maritime act in February, the chemical safety board canceled a March 19 public meeting in West Virginia while it sought to resolve the dispute. It has tentatively rescheduled the hearing for April 23 while awaiting the Coast Guard’s decision, which it could appeal to the Transportation Security Administration.

Bayer’s action also caught the attention of Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Mr. Stupak scheduled an April 21 hearing to review the company’s action, saying, “We are concerned about the way that Bayer may be misusing terrorism laws to suppress information related to the incident.”

Bayer believes it has a strong case for suppressing public discussion of its operations in West Virginia, said a company spokesman, Greg Coffey.

“In security matters, the site comes under the jurisdiction of the Coast Guard,” Mr. Coffey said. “We have and will continue to comply with the spirit of the regulations” of the maritime act.

And Bayer appears to have the support of the Coast Guard. A spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Chris O’Neil, said that the service considered the entire plant, not just the dock, a “regulated facility,” and that “it might only be prudent to protect that information” Bayer does not want discussed.

But Mr. Bresland said the chemical board contended that the maritime act applied only to transportation of the chemicals, not the onsite storage and processes. Methyl isocyanate, a chemical used in the production of carbamate pesticides, was not directly involved in the August explosion, which the company has said was caused by human error in a unit that contained the less toxic chemical methomyl.

But an above-ground storage tank that can hold up to 40,000 pounds of methyl isocyanate was just 50 feet to 75 feet from the blast area, and a much larger underground tank in a different part of the plant site can store an additional 200,000 pounds. In the Bhopal disaster, 50,000 to 90,000 pounds of the chemical leaked.

It is the onsite storage of the methyl isocyanate (or MIC) that has long concerned West Virginia environmentalists. After the Bhopal disaster, professors at West Virginia State University, which is next to the plant, and residents started People Concerned About MIC to monitor the plant.

“One of the ironies is that in the 1980s, one of the demands we had was that Carbide should act more like Bayer did in Germany and not store MIC at the plant and just make it when it needed to use it,” said Prof. Gerald E. Beller, chairman of the department of political science at the university, who helped start the local group.

There are many other issues related to the accident that the chemical safety board wants to talk about, including the amount of overtime Bayer employees had been working before the accident; how poor communications were between the plant and outside emergency crews the night of the accident; and how one of the two men who died, Barry Withrow, had a toxic level of cyanide in his blood that no one has been able to explain.

But a large part of what the board wants to talk about is the risks posed by the tanks of methyl isocyanate. If the explosion had damaged the smaller above-ground tank in particular, “the consequences of the accident might have been worse,” Mr. Bresland said.

The first of an occasional series exploring the varied ways in which California lobbyists and their employers press the levers of power.

Special interests spent a record $553 million lobbying California state government in the past two years.

For them, it was money well spent.

Makers of chemical fire- retardants poured in more than $9 million to kill a ban on fire-proofing chemicals in furniture that consumer groups say cause cancer.

The Morongo Band of Mission Indians used $4.39 million to muscle through a gambling deal to let the tribe add thousands of lucrative new slot machines to its casino.

The oil industry spent more than $10.5 million to influence the Legislature and state agencies. A 2007 industry association report touted that even in a Democratic-controlled Legislature, "of the 52 bills identified as priorities (in 2007), only three that we opposed were approved by the Legislature."

Of those three, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed two.

A Bee analysis of this past two-year session found the 10 highest-spending employers of private lobbyists shelled out a total of more than $70 million working the halls of state government. They rarely lost.

"You're fighting a mountain of money," said former Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View. "You have an idea, and they have enormous amounts of money. Who's going to win?"

Top lobbyists and their employers use the millions to amass armies of advocates to build alliances and cultivate relationships to influence their agenda. They buy meals and gifts and treat policymakers to Disneyland or Kings games. They amp up external pressure by blanketing their targets' constituents with mailers and radio ads.

Lobby fuels growth industry

In the past two decades, the amount spent on lobbying in California has increased with each two-year legislative session, rising from $193 million in 1989-90 to more than $550 million last session, state records show.

The number of groups hiring professional advocates has also grown, from 682 in 1975 to 2,365 at the start of the 2007-08 session.

With term limits capping how long legislators can serve in the statehouse, the lobby corps is largely the keeper of the Capitol's institutional knowledge.

Indeed, advocacy groups insist their success comes with earning lawmakers' trust and disseminating accurate information.

"You're either trustworthy or you're not," said Don Burns, the dean of the lobbying corps, who has represented an array of interests – from pool manufacturers to nuclear waste dumps – in a half-century of advocacy.

The California Chamber of Commerce's Allan Zaremberg put it this way: "The first thing is we have to ensure that we provide the appropriate level of knowledge and education, because I think that translates eventually into influence."

Strength found in numbers

The corps of lobbyists truly is California's third house – and a bigger one at that. Registered lobbyists outnumber lawmakers in Sacramento 8-to-1.

That ratio allows the richest interests the luxury of swarming the Legislature for key policy battles.

The California Teachers Association, the No. 4 lobbying spender, and the California Chamber of Commerce, ranked No. 8, each deployed nine full-time lobbyists last session.

AT&T had three staff lobbyists – and contracts with nine outside firms.

Frustrated lawmakers taking on a moneyed interest often describe the lobbying ranks aligned against them in military terms.

"I was outgunned," said Sen. Ellen Corbett, D-San Leandro, who estimated that 30 lobbyists were working against her 2008 bill to ban perfluorinated compounds, or PFCs, from food packaging.

Her bill passed the Legislature, but Schwarzenegger vetoed it.

"I would see them in the hallways meeting, outside the chambers, at committee hearings," said Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, D-San Francisco, recalling her 2007 fight with the chemical industry. "They were all over the place."

Ma's bill – banning phthalates in plastic toys – became law. But it was the only successful chemical ban of a dozen attempted over two years.

Of lawmakers and Kings

The sheer number of advocates is no guarantee of success. Lobbying, by nature, is a relationship business.

While lobbyists are limited to $10 a month in gifts to lawmakers and staff, their employers – the unions, businesses and trade groups paying them – have a much higher limit: $390 per year.

That is how elected officials regularly enjoy Kings games, meals at posh steakhouses and even tickets to the Rose Bowl free of charge.

Invariably, representatives of those footing the bill get face time by accompanying policymakers to the events.

Legislators and interest groups alike insist the gifts have no impact on lawmaking.

But Don Palmer, a professor who studies ethics and social responsibility, said human nature suggests otherwise.

"Sociologists call it the 'generalized norm or reciprocity,' " said Palmer, associate dean at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management. "We all learned it in kindergarten: When someone is nice to you or generous to you, then you feel obligated to be nice to them."

AT&T racked up $250,000 in such giveaways to lawmakers, staff and their families in the past two years. The company declined to be interviewed.

"(AT&T) will support everybody," said former Senate Republican leader Dick Ackerman. "They will invite everybody to their boxes, both Reeps and Dems, because they just want to try and have relationships with everybody."

PR blitzes heighten stakes

When retail lobbying is not enough, well-heeled interests have the resources to mobilize public relations campaigns – or at least threaten to do so – to ratchet up the pressure.

In early 2007, the Morongo tribe was telling every reporter and lawmaker within earshot of the Capitol that it had allotted $20 million for a PR offensive to win its battle for more slot machines.

The tribe vowed a statewide TV blitz, 500,000 pieces of direct mail, phone calls and even a door-knocking campaign in the districts of the 10 Democrats on the Assembly's gambling committee.

It appeared to be a "shock-and-awe"- scale effort to press for its gambling expansion aimed at majority Democrats. One lawmaker called the tribe out for bullying tactics.

As it turned out, the tribe spent only $3.5 million that quarter, according to financial disclosures filed months later. But the message had been sent – the tribe had the resources to alter the political playing field in Sacramento. Its casino expansion was approved.

The tribe declined to comment for this story.

The American Chemistry Council, an industry group, spent $4.7 million in a three-month span in 2008, much of it aimed at a single chemical ban, said Tim Shestek, the council's chief lobbyist.

Questioning the science behind removing bisphenol-A from plastic products, the industry warned that popular consumer goods would disappear if the ban were approved.

"We had to do a lot of educational efforts, and some of those educational efforts were expensive," Shestek said of the barrage of mailers, radio and newspaper ads unleashed on districts represented by the Legislature's swing votes.

The target of the industry's ire, a bill by Democratic Sen. Carole Migden, failed as many lawmakers "took a walk" during the vote, Capitol parlance for making one's self scarce to avoid choosing between a moneyed interest and an unpopular vote.

Power lies in blocking bills

The state's most powerful interests don't necessarily get their way with every bill or policy.

Complex issues involve multiple interests, making it harder for any one group to make a difference.

The California Hospital Association, for example, ranked as the sixth-largest spender, at $5.9 million. A large portion of that went toward TV ads pressing for lawmakers to pass the tardy state budget last year, said CHA spokeswoman Jan Emerson.

Hospitals suffered during the impasse because Medi-Cal payments were suspended yet patients continued to receive treatment. The TV ads aired, but the delay dragged on, largely unaffected.

* * *

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/03/could_your_recliner_be_dangero.html

Oregon Legislature considers toxics in consumer products

by Scott Learn, The Oregonian

Sunday March 29, 2009, 9:31 PM

Should Oregon have more say over the chemicals used to make your baby's bottle, her toys, your dishwasher detergent and your sofa?

The Legislature gets to answer that question this session, with a dozen bills targeting the chemical hazards of everyday life.

Potential toxics on the hit list range from fire retardants in upholstered furniture to phosphates in dishwasher soap to plastic additives in baby bottles and soft plastic toys.

The chemicals are commonplace. They're found at low levels almost everywhere, including human blood and urine, umbilical cords, breast milk, drinking water, birds and fish. They're also part and parcel of our consumer economy.

That's what makes them so tough to legislate.

Activists concede that, in most cases, the science isn't lock-tight that the low doses harm people or the environment. The amounts found in blood and drinking water are almost always well below levels the federal government considers unsafe.

But the crammed legislative agenda comes as more studies raise concerns about potential toxics in consumer products, particularly the effects on infants and children.

Given the federal government's go-slow history with mass-produced chemicals -- including lead, the now-banned pesticide DDT and PCBs, a mostly banned industrial insulator -- a cautious state approach makes sense, said Renee Hackenmiller-Paradis, environmental health director for the Oregon Environmental Council.

"In the long run, that's going to save a lot of suffering and a lot of dollars," she said.

The drive to crack down on chemicals faces a big political obstacle, said Terry Witt, executive director of Oregonians for Food and Shelter: the down economy.

"It's a double whammy," he said. "You're requiring more of agencies that have less money, and you're applying more regulation and expense on business."

The most sweeping bill, House Bill 2141, would expand the definition of hazardous substances to include products containing chemicals with long-term health effects. It would require labeling standards that can include the word "caution" or "warning." And it would give the state authority to ban products.

Two other bills target chemicals in products designed for children under 12. One, HB2792, would require the Department of Human Services to identify priority chemicals and allow DHS to require manufacturers of children's products to use safer alternatives, if available.

The second, HB2367, would bar sales of children's products with more than trace amounts of the plastic additives bisphenol-A and six types of phthalates. Most famously, that includes baby bottles containing bisphenol-A, the latest subject of dueling health claims and studies.

Rep. Paul Holvey, D-Eugene, chairman of the House consumer protection committee, said the bills are not about "banning every chemical under the sun." State regulators can draw on existing studies and research.

"Just like a doctor would do, we should have the ability to look at peer-reviewed studies and ask, 'Is this something we should be concerned about?'" Holvey said.

Industry groups lining up against the bills included the American Chemistry Council, Procter & Gamble, the Oregon Metals Industry Council and the International Bottled Water Association.

Rep. Jim Weidner, R-Yamhill, vice chairman of the consumer protection committee, said it makes more sense to let federal agencies take the lead.

Many manufacturers have global reach, said Tim Shestek, director of state affairs for the chemistry council, making it tough to comply with a potpourri of state policies.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration and other agencies are studying consumer product chemicals now, and Congress is debating whether to revamp U.S. toxics control.

"These are complex decisions that involve groups of scientists and lots of detailed information and research," Shestek said.

Last summer, Congress cut allowable levels of lead and six types of phthalates (pronounced THAL-ates), chemicals used to bind fragrances in shampoo and lotions and soften plastic in toys and lunchboxes.

Other Oregon bills would require manufacturer-funded recycling of rechargeable batteries and mercury-containing fluorescent bulbs, and pressure schools to use green cleaning products and fewer pesticides.

So far, the legislation that's moved farthest is Senate Bill 596, which would ban most uses of the fire retardant decabrominated diphenyl ether, classified as a possible human carcinogen, by 2011. It passed the Senate last week.

Deca-BDE is widely used in consumer products, including mattresses, upholstery and televisions. But Washington and Maine, which are already phasing out the chemical, concluded there are safer substitutes.

Like many consumer chemicals, the fire retardant gets into the environment and people via airborne dust and sewage treatment plants. Like DDT and PCBs, it lasts for decades and accumulates in aquatic life, said Travis Williams, Willamette Riverkeeper's executive director.

Private and public land owners in Portland Harbor, a federal Superfund site on the Willamette, are likely to spend tens of millions cleaning up PCBs and DDT from river sediment.

"It's hard to even fathom that this could happen again," Williams said.

Manufacturers are fighting the Deca-BDE ban, arguing that the evidence of harm is minimal. The chemistry council is fighting the ban on bisphenol-A, or BPA, a potential reproductive toxic.

Last year, the council successfully beat back a BPA ban in California, helped by an FDA study that said infant exposure to BPA from baby bottles and other food containers is 2,000 times lower than levels of concern.

But a later report issued by the National Toxicology Program cited "some concern" for brain and behavioral effects in fetuses, infants and children. Canada banned BPA from baby bottles. Europe decided not to.

Many retailers and manufacturers are ahead of lawmakers. Wal-Mart and Toys "R" Us decided last year to stop selling baby bottles made with BPA.

Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality is also setting a list of "priority persistent pollutants" to reduce water pollution.

The draft list includes 175 potential toxics, from pesticides to industrial metals.

Gail Shibley, who runs the state's environmental public health office, said her group would piggyback on that initiative and others.

"We need to keep human health concerns foremost," she said. "We are living in a soup of these exposures, from before we're born to our last breath."

-- Scott Learn; scottlearn@news.oregonian.com

Targeting chemical hazards

Upholstered furniture, mattresses, televisions: Can contain the fire retardant decabrominated diphenyl ether, a possible human carcinogen. Proposal: Largely ban by 2011.

Plastic baby bottles, sippy cups: Can contain bisphenol-A, which the National Toxicology Programs says raise "some concern" for health effects in fetuses, infants and children. Proposal: Bar sale of consumer products for children under 12 containing BPA.

Soft plastic toys, baby lotion, baby shampoo: Can contain phthalates, some of which have shown reproductive toxicity in animal studies. Proposal: Bar sale of consumer products for children under 12 containing some phthalates.

Automatic dishwasher detergent: Can contain phosphorous, which causes oxygen-depleting algal blooms in rivers. Proposal: Bar dishwasher detergent with more than minimal amounts of phosphorous.

Fluorescent bulbs: Contain small amounts of mercury, a neurotoxin. Proposal: Require manufacturers to pay for recycling.

Rechargeable batteries: Contain toxic heavy metals, a persistent water pollutant. Proposal: Require manufacturers to pay for recycling.

Paint: Can contain a variety of chemicals, including volatile organic compounds, an indoor and outdoor air pollution. Proposal: Initiate a pilot paint recycling program.

Cleaning products (e.g. drain cleaners, most oven cleaners, some toilet bowl cleaners, some rust removers; solvent-based cleaning products, such as spot removers, degreasers, and some furniture polishes and metal polishes): Can contain ingredients that irritate lungs, skin and eyes; can accidentally poison children. Proposed action: Require schools to use green cleaning products by 2011, unless not "economically feasible."

Pesticides: Wide variety of human and environmental effects. Proposals: Require schools to minimize pesticide use; require foresters and farmers within a quarter mile of a school to provide written notice before aerial spraying.

-- Scott Learn

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The American Psychiatric Association said on Wednesday it will end medical education seminars and meals sponsored by drug companies at its annual meetings to reduce chances for financial conflicts of interest.

The group, which represents 38,000 doctors, is among the first to say no to the drug-company sponsored seminars at its meetings, which many critics say blur the line between education and advertising.

Psychiatrists have been at the front of a controversy over conflicts of interest following accusations last year by Republican U.S. Senator Charles Grassley that prominent Harvard University psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Biederman and others failed to fully disclose payments from drug companies.

Psychiatric drugs represent billions of dollars in global sales. Last July, Grassley asked the APA to provide information about its financial ties with the drug industry.

Dr. Nada Stotland, president of the APA, said the group began working on the issue a year ago, long before it became the subject of a probe.

"We're not blaming the pharmaceutical companies for anything and we're not severing all relations with them," Stotland said in a telephone interview.

She said drug companies paid the group in order to sponsor glitzy education symposiums put on by prominent doctors during its annual meetings, typically over breakfast or dinner.

And while Stotland said the group took care to avoid biased reporting at these presentations, she said the notion of mixing something that is basically a gift with education "wasn't the healthiest mixture."

The move includes the elimination of industry-supplied meals that were provided during the symposiums.

"There is a perception that accepting meals provided by pharmaceutical companies may have a subtle influence on doctors' prescribing habits," Dr. James Scully, APA's medical director and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

"While industry-funded meals used to be normal operating procedure at medical meetings, a sea change is currently underway in how we manage industry relationships," he said.

"What was acceptable five years ago isn't necessarily acceptable today."

Earlier this year, many drug makers said they would stop giving out small gifts such as pens and flash drives as part of new voluntary guidelines from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry group in Washington.

The group's 2002 code already bans more costly gifts like trips to resorts, and calls for companies that pay for medical education at conferences to leave the content to outside experts.

(Editing by Will Dunham)

FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.” Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.

But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier. Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists — William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him “infinitely smart.” Dyson — a mathematics prodigy who came to this country at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory — not only did path-breaking science of his own; he also witnessed the development of modern physics, thinking alongside most of the luminous figures of the age, including Einstein, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Witten, the “high priest of string theory” whose office at the institute is just across the hall from Dyson’s. Yet instead of hewing to that fundamental field, Dyson chose to pursue broader and more unusual pursuits than most physicists — and has lived a more original life.

Among Dyson’s gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics. Dyson has written more than a dozen books, including “Origins of Life” (1999), which synthesizes recent discoveries by biologists and geologists into an evaluation of the double-origin hypothesis, the possibility that life began twice; “Disturbing the Universe” (1979) tries among other things to reconcile science and humanity. “Weapons and Hope” (1984) is his meditation on the meaning and danger of nuclear weapons that won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Dyson’s books display such masterly control of complex matters that smart young people read him and want to be scientists; older citizens finish his books and feel smart.

Yet even while probing and sifting, Dyson is always whimsically gazing into the beyond. As a boy he sketched plans for English rocket ships that could explore the stars, and then, in midlife, he helped design an American spacecraft to be powered by exploding atomic bombs — a secret Air Force project known as Orion. Dyson remains an armchair astronaut who speculates with glee about the coming of cheap space travel, when families can leave an overcrowded earth to homestead on asteroids and comets, swooping around the universe via solar sail craft. Dyson is convinced that our current “age of computers” will soon give way to “the age of domesticated biotechnology.” Bio-tech, he writes in his book, “Infinite in All Directions” (1988), “offers us the chance to imitate nature’s speed and flexibility,” and he imagines the furniture and art that people will “grow” for themselves, the pet dinosaurs they will “grow” for their children, along with an idiosyncratic menagerie of genetically engineered cousins of the carbon-eating tree: termites to consume derelict automobiles, a potato capable of flourishing on the dry red surfaces of Mars, a collision-avoiding car.

These ideas attract derision similar to Dyson’s essays on climate change, but he is an undeterred octogenarian futurist. “I don’t think of myself predicting things,” he says. “I’m expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it’s a question of how badly people want them to. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.” Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination’s ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. “You point Freeman at a problem and he’ll solve it,” Goldberger says. “He’s extraordinarily powerful.” Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate. Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.

Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize — but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”

Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.

IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”

A particularly distressed member of that public was Dyson’s own wife, Imme, who, after seeing the film in a local theater with Dyson when it was released in 2006, looked at her husband out on the sidewalk and, with visions of drowning polar bears still in her eyes, reproached him: “Everything you told me is wrong!” she cried.

“The polar bears will be fine,” he assured her.

Not long ago Dyson sat in his institute office, a chamber so neat it reminds Dyson’s friend, the writer John McPhee, of a Japanese living room. On shelves beside Dyson were books about stellar evolution, viruses, thermodynamics and terrorism. “The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models,” Dyson was saying. “They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.” Dyson speaks in calm, clear tones that carry simultaneous evidence of his English childhood, the move to the United States after completing his university studies at Cambridge and more than 50 years of marriage to the German-born Imme, but his opinions can be barbed, especially when a conversation turns to climate change. Climate models, he says, take into account atmospheric motion and water levels but have no feeling for the chemistry and biology of sky, soil and trees. “The biologists have essentially been pushed aside,” he continues. “Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.”

Dyson agrees with the prevailing view that there are rapidly rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere caused by human activity. To the planet, he suggests, the rising carbon may well be a MacGuffin, a striking yet ultimately benign occurrence in what Dyson says is still “a relatively cool period in the earth’s history.” The warming, he says, is not global but local, “making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter.” Far from expecting any drastic harmful consequences from these increased temperatures, he says the carbon may well be salubrious — a sign that “the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse,” because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer promoting forest growth and crop yields. “Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now,” he contends, “and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.” Dyson calls ocean acidification, which many scientists say is destroying the saltwater food chain, a genuine but probably exaggerated problem. Sea levels, he says, are rising steadily, but why this is and what dangers it might portend “cannot be predicted until we know much more about its causes.”

For Hansen, the dark agent of the looming environmental apocalypse is carbon dioxide contained in coal smoke. Coal, he has written, “is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.” Hansen has referred to railroad cars transporting coal as “death trains.” Dyson, on the other hand, told me in conversations and e-mail messages that “Jim Hansen’s crusade against coal overstates the harm carbon dioxide can do.” Dyson well remembers the lethal black London coal fog of his youth when, after a day of visiting the city, he would return to his hometown of Winchester with his white shirt collar turned black. Coal, Dyson says, contains “real pollutants” like soot, sulphur and nitrogen oxides, “really nasty stuff that makes people sick and looks ugly.” These are “rightly considered a moral evil,” he says, but they “can be reduced to low levels by scrubbers at an affordable cost.” He says Hansen “exploits” the toxic elements of burning coal as a way of condemning the carbon dioxide it releases, “which cannot be reduced at an affordable cost, but does not do any substantial harm.”

Science is not a matter of opinion; it is a question of data. Climate change is an issue for which Dyson is asking for more evidence, and leading climate scientists are replying by saying if we wait for sufficient proof to satisfy you, it may be too late. That is the position of a more moderate expert on climate change, William Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University, who says, “I don’t think it’s time to panic,” but contends that, because of global warming, “more sea-level rise is inevitable and will displace millions; melting high-altitude glaciers will threaten the food supplies for perhaps a billion or more; and ocean acidification could undermine the food supply of another billion or so.” Dyson strongly disagrees with each of these points, and there follows, as you move back and forth between the two positions, claims and counterclaims, a dense thicket of mitigating scientific indicators that all have the timbre of truth and the ring of potential plausibility. One of Dyson’s more significant surmises is that a warming climate could be forestalling a new ice age. Is he wrong? No one can say for sure. Beyond the specific points of factual dispute, Dyson has said that it all boils down to “a deeper disagreement about values” between those who think “nature knows best” and that “any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil,” and “humanists,” like himself, who contend that protecting the existing biosphere is not as important as fighting more repugnant evils like war, poverty and unemployment.

Embedded in all of Dyson’s strong opinions about public policy is a dual spirit of social activism and uneasiness about class dating all the way back to Winchester, where he was raised in the 1920s and ’30s by his father, George Dyson, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith. George was the music instructor at Winchester College, an old and prestigious secondary school, and a composer. Dyson’s mother, Mildred Atkey, came from a more prosperous Wimbledon family that had its own tennis court. Together they raised Dyson and his sister, Alice, in what Dyson calls a “watered-down Church of England Christianity” that regarded religion as a guide to living rather than any system of belief. The emphasis on tolerance, charity and community — and the free time afforded by the luxury of four servants — led Mildred to organize a club for teenage girls and a birth-control clinic. These institutions meshed uneasily with her patrician Victorian sensibilities. The girls were never, Dyson says, “considered equals,” and Mildred told him with amusement about the young mother who walked in carrying a red-headed infant. “What a beautiful baby,” Mildred reported saying. “Does he take after his father?”

“Oh, I couldn’t tell you, Mum,” came the reply. “He kept his hat on.”

Winchester is a medieval town in which, Dyson writes, he felt that everyone was looking backward, mourning all the young men lost to one world war while silently anticipating his own generation’s impending demise. He renounced the nostalgia, the servants, the hard-line social castes. But what he liked about growing up in England was the landscape. The country’s successful alteration of wilderness and swamp had created a completely new green ecology, allowing plants, animals and humans to thrive in “a community of species.” Dyson has always been strongly opposed to the idea that there is any such thing as an optimal ecosystem — “life is always changing” — and he abhors the notion that men and women are something apart from nature, that “we must apologize for being human.” Humans, he says, have a duty to restructure nature for their survival.

All this may explain why the same man could write “we live on a shrinking and vulnerable planet which our lack of foresight is rapidly turning into a slum” and yet gently chide the sort of Americans who march against coal in Washington. Dyson has great affection for coal and for one big reason: It is so inexpensive that most of the world can afford it. “There’s a lot of truth to the statement Greens are people who never had to worry about their grocery bills,” he says. (“Many of these people are my friends,” he will also tell you.) To Dyson, “the move of the populations of China and India from poverty to middle-class prosperity should be the great historic achievement of the century. Without coal it cannot happen.” That said, Dyson sees coal as the interim kindling of progress. In “roughly 50 years,” he predicts, solar energy will become cheap and abundant, and “there are many good reasons for preferring it to coal.”

...

Dyson says it’s only principle that leads him to question global warming: “According to the global-warming people, I say what I say because I’m paid by the oil industry. Of course I’m not, but that’s part of their rhetoric. If you doubt it, you’re a bad person, a tool of the oil or coal industry.” Global warming, he added, “has become a party line.”

What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.” It’s a point of pride with Dyson that in 1951 he became a member of the physics faculty at Cornell and then, two years later, moved on to the Institute for Advanced Study, where he became an influential man, a pragmatist providing solutions to the military and Congress, and also the 2000 winner of the $1 million Templeton Prize for broadening the understanding of science and religion, an award previously given to Mother Teresa and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — all without ever earning a Ph.D. Dyson may, in fact, be the ultimate outsider-insider, “the world’s most civil heretic,” as the classical composer Paul Moravec, the artistic consultant at the institute, says of him.

Climate-change specialists often speak of global warming as a matter of moral conscience. Dyson says he thinks they sound presumptuous. As he warned that day four years ago at Boston University, the history of science is filled with those “who make confident predictions about the future and end up believing their predictions,” and he cites examples of things people anticipated to the point of terrified certainty that never actually occurred, ranging from hellfire, to Hitler’s atomic bomb, to the Y2K millennium bug. “It’s always possible Hansen could turn out to be right,” he says of the climate scientist. “If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He’s a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don’t have a Ph.D. He’s published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven’t. By the public standard he’s qualified to talk and I’m not. But I do because I think I’m right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it’s true my career doesn’t depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it’s more a matter of judgement than knowledge.”

Reached by telephone, Hansen sounds annoyed as he says, “There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson,” who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” In an e-mail message, he adds that his own concern about global warming is not based only on models, and that while he respects the “open-mindedness” of Dyson, “if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.”

When Dyson hears about this, he looks, if possible, like a person taking the longer view. He is a short, sinewy man with strawlike filaments of excitable gray hair that make him resemble an upside-down broom. Every day he dresses with the same frowzy Oxbridge formality in L. L. Bean khaki trousers (his daughter Mia is a minister in Maine), a tweed sport coat, a necktie (most often one made for him, he says, by another daughter, Emily, many years ago “in the age of primary colors”) and wool sweater-vests. On cold days he wears a second vest, one right over the other, and the effect is like a window with two sets of curtains. His smile is the real window, a delighted beam that appears to float free from his face, strangely dynamic with its electric ears and quantum nose, and his laugh is so hearty it shakes him. The smile and laughter have the effect of softening Dyson’s formality, transforming him into a sage and friendly elf, and also reminding those he talks with that he has spent a lifetime immersed in efforts to find what he considers humane solutions to dire problems, whose controversial gloss never seems to agitate him. His eyes are murky gray, and whatever he’s thinking beyond what he says, the eyes never betray.

...

This was an early indication of Dyson’s growing interest in what one day would be called climate studies. In 1976, Dyson began making regular trips to the Institute for Energy Analysis in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where the director, Alvin Weinberg, was in the business of investigating alternative sources of power. Charles David Keeling’s pioneering measurements at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, showed rapidly increasing carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere; and in Tennessee, Dyson joined a group of meteorologists and biologists trying to understand the effects of carbon on the Earth and air. He was now becoming a climate expert. Eventually Dyson published a paper titled “Can We Control the Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere?” His answer was yes, and he added that any emergency could be temporarily thwarted with a “carbon bank” of “fast-growing trees.” He calculated how many trees it would take to remove all carbon from the atmosphere. The number, he says, was a trillion, which was “in principle quite feasible.” Dyson says the paper is “what I’d like people to judge me by. I still think everything it says is true.”

Eventually he would embrace another idea: the notorious carbon-eating trees, which would be genetically engineered to absorb more carbon than normal trees. Of them, he admits: “I suppose it sounds like science fiction. Genetic engineering is politically unpopular in the moment.”

In the 1970s, Dyson participated in other climate studies conducted by Jason, a small government-financed group of the country’s finest scientists, whose members gather each summer near San Diego to work on (often) classified (usually) scientific dilemmas of (frequently) military interest to the government. Dyson has, as he admits, a restless nature, and by the time many scientists were thinking about climate, Dyson was on to other problems. Often on his mind were proposals submitted by the government to Jason. “Mainly we kill stupid projects,” he says.

Some scientists refuse military work on the grounds that involvement in killing is sin. Dyson was opposed to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, but not to generals. He had seen in England how a military more enlightened by quantitative analysis could have better protected its men and saved the lives of civilians. “I always felt the worse the situation was, the more important it was to keep talking to the military,” he says. Over the years he says he pushed the rejection of the idea of dropping atomic bombs on North Vietnam and solved problems in adaptive optics for telescopes. Lately he has been “trying to help the intelligence people be aware of what the bad guys may be doing with biology.” Dyson thinks of himself as “fighting for peace,” and Joel Lebowitz, a Rutgers physicist who has known Dyson for 50 years, says Dyson lives up to that: “He works for Jason and he’s out there demonstrating against the Iraq war.”

Lately Dyson has been lamenting that he and Imme “don’t see so much of each other. We’re always rushing around.” But one evening last month they sat down in a living room filled with Imme’s running trophies and photographs of their children to watch “An Inconvenient Truth” again. There was a print of Einstein above the television. And then there was Al Gore below him, telling of the late Roger Revelle, a Harvard scientist who first alerted the undergraduate Gore to how severe the climate’s problems would become. Gore warned of the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, the vanishing glaciers of Peru and “off the charts” carbon levels in the air. “The so-called skeptics” say this “seems perfectly O.K.,” Gore said, and Imme looked at her husband. She is even slighter than he is, a pretty wood sprite in running shoes. “How far do you allow the oceans to rise before you say, This is no good?” she asked Dyson.

“When I see clear evidence of harm,” he said.

“Then it’s too late,” she replied. “Shouldn’t we not add to what nature’s doing?”

“The costs of what Gore tells us to do would be extremely large,” Dyson said. “By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor. I’m concerned about the Chinese.”

“They’re the biggest polluters,” Imme replied.

“They’re also changing their standard of living the most, going from poor to middle class. To me that’s very precious.”

The film continued with Gore predicting violent hurricanes, typhoons and tornados. “How in God’s name could that happen here?” Gore said, talking about Hurricane Katrina. “Nature’s been going crazy.”

“That is of course just nonsense,” Dyson said calmly. “With Katrina, all the damage was due to the fact that nobody had taken the trouble to build adequate dikes. To point to Katrina and make any clear connection to global warming is very misleading.”

Now came Arctic scenes, with Gore telling of disappearing ice, drunken trees and drowning polar bears. “Most of the time in history the Arctic has been free of ice,” Dyson said. “A year ago when we went to Greenland where warming is the strongest, the people loved it.”

“They were so proud,” Imme agreed. “They could grow their own cabbage.”

The film ended. “I think Gore does a brilliant job,” Dyson said. “For most people I’d think this would be quite effective. But I knew Roger Revelle. He was definitely a skeptic. He’s not alive to defend himself.”

“All my friends say how smart and farsighted Al Gore is,” she said.

“He certainly is a good preacher,” Dyson replied. “Forty years ago it was fashionable to worry about the coming ice age. Better to attack the real problems like the extinction of species and overfishing. There are so many practical measures we could take.”

“I’m still perfectly happy if you buy me a Prius!” Imme said.

“It’s toys for the rich,” her husband smiled, and then they were arguing about windmills.

Students of St. Thomas' Girls School in Matara, about 160 km south of the capital Colombo were admitted immediately after they were given Rubella vaccine.

H. B. Wanninayake, a Health Ministry official in Colombo said one of the girls died Friday morning.

Health officials in Matara had given vaccine to about 300 students after which some students had fallen ill and were admitted to the hospital.

The hospitalized students were given artificial respiration while their blood samples were taken to Medical Research Institute for tests.

Palitha Maheepala of the Health Ministry said further investigations would be conducted by the Health officials about the incident following a directive by Health Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva. 

The PSA blood test, used to screen for prostate cancer, saves few lives and leads to risky and unnecessary treatments for large numbers of men, two large studies have found.

The findings, the first based on rigorous, randomized studies, confirm some longstanding concerns about the wisdom of widespread prostate cancer screening. Although the studies are continuing, results so far are considered significant and the most definitive to date.

The PSA test, which measures a protein released by prostate cells, does what it is supposed to do — indicates a cancer might be present, leading to biopsies to determine if there is a tumor. But it has been difficult to know whether finding prostate cancer early saves lives. Most of the cancers tend to grow very slowly and are never a threat and, with the faster-growing ones, even early diagnosis might be too late.

The studies — one in Europe and the other in the United States — are “some of the most important studies in the history of men’s health,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.

In the European study, 48 men were told they had prostate cancer and needlessly treated for it for every man whose death was prevented within a decade after having had a PSA test.

Dr. Peter B. Bach, a physician and epidemiologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, says one way to think of the data is to suppose he has a PSA test today. It leads to a biopsy that reveals he has prostate cancer, and he is treated for it. There is a one in 50 chance that, in 2019 or later, he will be spared death from a cancer that would otherwise have killed him. And there is a 49 in 50 chance that he will have been treated unnecessarily for a cancer that was never a threat to his life.

Prostate cancer treatment can result in impotence and incontinence when surgery is used to destroy the prostate, and, at times, painful defecation or chronic diarrhea when the treatment is radiation.

As soon as the PSA test was introduced in 1987, it became a routine part of preventive health care for many men age 40 and older. Experts debated its value, but their views were largely based on less compelling data that often involved statistical modeling and inferences. Now, with the new data, cancer experts said men should carefully consider the possible risks and benefits of treatment before deciding to be screened. Some may decide not to be screened at all.

For years, the cancer society has urged men to be informed before deciding to have a PSA test. “Now we actually have something to inform them with,” Dr. Brawley said. “We’ve got numbers.”

The publication of data from the two new studies should change the discussion, said Dr. David F. Ransohoff, an internist and cancer epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina. “This is not relying on modeling anymore,” he said. “This is not some abstract, pointy-headed exercise. This is the real world, and this is real data.”

Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a professor of medicine at Dartmouth who studies cancer screening, also welcomed the new data. “We’ve been waiting years for this,” he said. “It’s a shame we didn’t have it 20 years ago.”

Both reports were published online Wednesday by The New England Journal of Medicine. One involved 182,000 men in seven European countries; the other, by the National Cancer Institute, involved nearly 77,000 men at 10 medical centers in the United States.

In both, participants were randomly assigned to be screened — or not — with the PSA test, whose initials stand for prostate-specific antigen. In each study, the two groups were followed for more than a decade while researchers counted deaths from prostate cancer, asking whether screening made a difference.

The European data involved a consortium of studies with different designs. Taken together, the studies found that screening was associated with a 20 percent relative reduction in the prostate cancer death rate. But the number of lives saved was small — seven fewer prostate cancer deaths for every 10,000 men screened and followed for nine years.

The American study, led by Dr. Gerald L. Andriole of Washington University, had a single design. It found no reduction in deaths from prostate cancer after most of the men had been followed for 10 years. Every man has been followed for at least seven years, said Dr. Barnett Kramer, a study co-author at the National Institutes of Health. By seven years, the death rate was 13 percent lower for the unscreened group.

The European study saw no benefit of screening in the first seven years of follow-up.

Screening is not only an issue in prostate cancer. If the European study is correct, mammography has about the same benefit as the PSA test, said Dr. Michael B. Barry, a prostate cancer researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital who wrote an editorial accompanying the papers. But prostate cancers often are less dangerous than breast cancers, so screening and subsequent therapy can result in more harm. With mammography, about 10 women receive a diagnosis and needless treatment for breast cancer to prevent one death. With both cancers, researchers say they badly need a way to distinguish tumors that would be deadly without treatment from those that would not.

When the American and European studies began, in the early 1990s, PSA testing was well under way in the United States, and many expected that the screening test would make the prostate cancer death rate plummet by 50 percent or more. Dr. Brawley was at the cancer institute then, though not directly involved with its prostate cancer screening study. But he saw the reactions.

Some urologists said the study was unethical, because some people would not be screened, and demanded it be shut down, he said. One group of black urologists encouraged black men not to participate because blacks have a greater risk of prostate cancer and it seemed obvious they should be screened.

Some thought that they would see fewer cancer deaths among screened men as quickly as five years. But it became clear that screening would not have a large, immediate effect — if it did, the studies would have been stopped and victory declared. Cancer researchers began turning to less rigorous sources of data, with some arguing that screening was preventing cancer deaths and others arguing it was not.

In the United States, many men and their doctors have made up their minds — most men over age 50 have already been screened, and each year more than 180,000 receive a diagnosis of prostate cancer. In Europe, said Dr. Fritz H. Schröder of Erasmus University, the lead author of the European study, most men are not screened. “The mentality of Europeans is different,” he said, and screening is not so highly promoted.

Both studies will continue to follow the men. It remains possible that the United States study will eventually find that screening can reduce the prostate cancer death rate, researchers say, or that both studies will conclude that there is no real reduction.

“I certainly think there’s information here that’s food for thought,” Dr. Brawley said.

The benefits of prostate cancer screening, he said, are “modest at best and with a greater downside than any other cancer we screen for.”

WHO mulls stricter transport of bio products

By Andrew Jack

Published: March 16 2009 22:10 | Last updated: March 16 2009 22:10

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- When President Obama named Lisa Jackson to be his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, advocates for tougher regulation of the toxic chemical C8 were optimistic.

Read more in the Sustained Outrage blog.

Now those advocates are worried. Last month, Jackson named lawyer Robert M. Sussman to be her "senior policy counsel," to advise her on energy and environmental issues across EPA's broad regulatory authority.

For several years, Sussman represented 3M Corp., helping the agency deal with EPA efforts to understand - and perhaps regulate - what C8 and similar chemicals are doing to public health and the environment.

Sussman worked for EPA during the Clinton administration and later became a partner in the Washington office of the Los Angeles law firm, Latham & Watkins.

After retiring from the law firm, Sussman became a fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank run by John Podesta, a former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton.

Last week, a lawyer for residents of three states where these perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs, have polluted drinking water wrote to Jackson to urge her to ban Sussman from any involvement in these issues.

"What is not clear ... is the scope of the policy issues for which USEPA will be looking to Mr. Sussman to provide counsel," wrote Robert A. Bilott, who represents residents in West Virginia, New Jersey and Minnesota whose drinking water is contaminated.

"The scope of those interactions is of concern to us because of the extent to which Mr. Sussman was directly involved in representing the interests of perfluorochemicals manufacturers in negotiations with USEPA while he was a partner at Latham & Watkins," Bilott wrote.

"Because current issues will likely require your office to assess what particular policies to pursue with respect to perfluoro-chemical contamination of drinking water supplies, we are concerned by the conflict that could arise if Mr. Sussman were involved in any way with any of those issues while at USEPA," he wrote.

Bilott asked that EPA "confirm that Mr. Sussman will have no involvement of any kind in any perfluoro-chemical issues while working at USEPA, including any negotiations within the agency or with outside parties, preparation or transmittal of communications within the agency, to or from other agencies at the state or federal level, or to or from the public (including the press and Congressional staffs), or other contacts."

U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigators found "significant objectionable conditions" during an inspection of a Genzyme Corp. plant that makes expensive biotechnology drugs, according to a copy of an agency warning letter.

The Feb. 27 letter outlines a number of deficiencies in the manufacturing process at the Boston plant, which produces some of the company's best-selling products, including drugs such as Myozyme, Cerezyme and Fabrazyme.

Genzyme last week disclosed the existence of a warning letter from the FDA but didn't release the details of the communication. The FDA released a redacted copy of the letter after a request by The ...